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[Accountability-tf] Notes from eleventh call

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Antony Gollan agollan at ripe.net
Tue Oct 10 15:59:04 CEST 2017

Dear task force members,

Here are the notes from yesterday’s call.

Cheers

Antony

###

RIPE Accountability Task Force Meeting Notes

9 October 2017

Attendees:
Athina Fragkouli, Antony Gollan, Alexander Isavnin, Peter Koch, Francesca Merletti, Carsten Schiefner, William Sylvester

1. Welcome, finalise agenda
2. Review of open action items
3. Review from face-to-face meeting and preparations for Dubai (pre-meeting email & presentation)
4. Discuss input requested from community and how to receive feedback

1. Welcome, finalise agenda

There were no changes to the agenda.

2. Review of open action items

20170907-1: Malcolm to finalise the mind-map as a supporting document for the task force. [Added after the call].

Antony said this was something they had added after the last call. This was about putting together a final version of the mind-map that could go into their report as a supporting document, and so there was no rush with this.

20170907-2: RIPE NCC to research and report back on what governance obligations are there for the RIPE NCC to abide by community policy.

Athina said she had looked into this and it was correct to say that the RIPE NCC was accountable to its membership rather than the RIPE community. In the RIPE NCC Activity Plan and in the annual report it was described how the RIPE NCC implements RIPE policies, but it was a description rather than a legal obligation towards RIPE. RIPE was not a legal entity, it was challenging to create a legal obligation towards something that did not have any contractual capacities. If they wanted to create this obligation, perhaps they could sign an agreement with Hans Petter, but then their agreement would be with the RIPE Chair and other people in the community would not be able to challenge the RIPE NCC on this basis. However, she could see the value of having something in place, even if it was only an MoU with the RIPE Chair – it would send a message to the community. If the group thought this would create value, they could find a way to pass on the right message.

William said he had discussed this recently with some RIPE community members and they had talked about having a kind of “social contract” rather than a legal agreement.

Alexander said this could be in the form of a declaration by the RIPE NCC rather than a contract.

William said this was something where they could ask the community what it wanted to do. Were they comfortable that there was nothing official? He didn’t think they needed to solve this now, but it was an item they should add to their list of questions to the community.

20170907-3: the task force to clarify with the community: Is public benefit a core aspirational factor, or are RIPE community members working for their own benefit? (There is also likely some research that can be done into RIPE Documents here as well).

Antony said this was something that had come up from their face-to-face meeting and was something they wanted to ask the community during their presentation at RIPE 75 (or possibly on the mailing list before) – does RIPE exist for a wider public benefit, or is it only in the narrow self-interest of network operators.

20170907-4: Malcolm to work draft a definition of consensus/rough consensus that can be presented to the community.

This was something from the face-to-face meeting and Malcolm had confirmed that he was working on this.

20170703-2: RIPE NCC to look for past statements/presentations that might be relevant to the TF’s work.

Antony said was something that the RIPE NCC still had to do. He noted that he had been all the way through the RIPE mailing list and hadn’t found much to report, so he wanted to caution against expecting too much here.

20170509-1: TF Chairs to put together work plan after the meeting.

20170306-1: RIPE NCC to further develop accountability mapping document with task force input.

20170306-2: Task force members to review and comment on accountability mapping document.

Antony said these three items were mostly placeholders, though they had shared an updated version of the accountability mapping document on the mailing list.

3. Review from face-to-face meeting and preparations for Dubai (pre-meeting email & presentation)

William said they would want to send out an email to the RIPE community early next week. The presentation at RIPE 75 would likely be a summary of the staff presentation they had given during their face-to-face meeting, with plenty of room for community feedback and they would go back to the mailing list after the meeting. Hopefully they would be able to finalise the work of the task force during RIPE 76 in Marseilles.

William asked if they had a list of questions they wanted to ask the community for clarification on.

Antony said he could put this together – they could start from the table of contents they’d put together at the face-to-face meeting and work backwards from there.

***Action: RIPE NCC to put together a list of questions to ask the community based on TF discussions.

4. Discuss input requested from community and how to receive feedback

William asked how people would respond – they would email the RIPE-list ahead of the meeting and people could speak at the microphones during his presentation. How should people comment after the meeting – should they have a deadline and where should feedback be sent? He suggested they have a comment period for the month of November, and maybe close off during the second week of December so they could review this as they worked towards the May meeting

Athina agreed that it made sense to have a comment period and one month was probably fine. They could extend this if they needed to and come back to the community with an updated version of what they had heard from the community.

William said that 1 December was a Friday – they could use that as a deadline. They didn’t need to have a hard deadline, they could encourage more comments afterwards and extend it if they needed to.

The group discussed which mailing list it should go to and agreed that RIPE-list was best.

Action Items

20171009: RIPE NCC to put together a list of questions to ask the community based on TF discussions.